David Lynch has died aged 78
- Thread starter YCoCg
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You haven’t seen any Twin Peaks yet?
bender
What time is it?
I've watched the first episode four of five times, but always fall off quickly. It's on my bucket list but I fear it's going to fall into the category of shows/movies I respect more than I actually enjoy.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
You need to change that ASAP.
The complete blu ray set with lots of behind the scene stuff got a reprint recently for just $60.
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It’s a slow burn, often compared to kabuki theater in tone, so it does require patience. An abridged run that skips the filler in season 2 is definitely worth an attempt though. I recently got to see Fire Walk With Me again on the big screen and phew, that is cinema that stays with you.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
S2 goes places but it has a very strong finale. I'm in the middle of a rewatch myself right now and at near the mid point of S2. It goes a bit absurd but it's still good fun, more entertaining than almost all TV slop that comes out these days.
bender
What time is it?
I have Fire Walk With Me too. As much as I enjoyed listening to interviews with Lynch or people talking about the man, I think I've only seen Mulholland Drive which I enjoyed (I do have Eraserhead and Blue Velvet on my wish list). I think I just need to be in the right mood.
I collect VHS tapes
Gold Member
If you’re struggling already s2 is going to kill u
Give Blue Velvet a go. Easily one of Lynch’s more linear works. Might help ease you into his style
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bender
What time is it?
It's not about linearity or ambiguity, I appreciate those things. It's the performances and I don't think they are bad per se, I just don't have a good way of explaining it. I'm reminded of Fargo, which everyone seems to love, but I didn't care for it as I never found myself invested in the characters.
Werewolf Jones
Member
I watched Blue Velvet the other day. Still unsure how I feel about it tbh which is a good thing.
I will watch Twin Peaks this year.
I will watch Twin Peaks this year.
Wildebeest
Member
My list of the most essential Lynch that the critics are too scared to tell you about. In some sort of order.
Wild at Heart
Dune
David Lynch on Cooking Quinoa
Crazy Clown Time Music Video
Wild at Heart
Dune
David Lynch on Cooking Quinoa
Crazy Clown Time Music Video
OmegaSupreme
advanced basic bitch
I need to get around to Twin Peaks as well. I'm old enough to remember some hype about it when it came out, but I was very young. I've just gotten around to watching it since I've been an adult.
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rubik's dude
Member
There's a fan edit called Northwest Passage that attempts to abridge the TV series. I believe it's made by the same guy (Q2) that did the fan edit of FWWM that incorporated all the Missing Pieces deleted scenes. Dunno if the former is any good, but the latter was really well done.
Mulholland Drive is another good one. It was originally meant to be a Twin Peaks spinoff for Audrey, and outta all of Lynch's movies, it's probably the easiest to "figure out" what happens.
Chuck Berry
Gold Member
Both the first two seasons are on sale for $9.99 each on Prime. Snagged both.
DKehoe
Member
It's remarkable that Sheryl Lee was initially cast as a pretty local girl to play a dead body and pose for a homecoming queen photograph, with nothing else originally planned for her yet she went on to deliver that performance in Fire Walk With Me.
Doom85
Member
I personally found Lost Highway much easier to follow than Mulholland Drive.
Lost Highway spoiler:
When I kept in the back of my mind that moment when Bill Pullman’s character is talking to the police, and they ask him if he owns a camera of any sort in his house, and he says no because, as he explains, he likes to remember events as how he remembers them rather than through some recording or such.
When the second half of the film began to play out as it did, I started to realize what the film was doing due to remembering that earlier scene. I had a moment of happiness as I knew I nailed it when he meets the Mystery Man in the climax and the Mystery Man pulls out a video camera and asks him, “and your name. What the fuck is your name?!”
When the second half of the film began to play out as it did, I started to realize what the film was doing due to remembering that earlier scene. I had a moment of happiness as I knew I nailed it when he meets the Mystery Man in the climax and the Mystery Man pulls out a video camera and asks him, “and your name. What the fuck is your name?!”
Me watching Lost Highway:
Me watching Mulholland Drive:
(and yes, I know the above scene references Twin Peaks
)
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
All this needs is the addition of S3 ("The Return") with all 18 episodes in solid green. And... episode 8 in green so bright it burns your eyes.I used this guide:
The Return was actually the most Lynchian of all, he had total control over every aspect of the production for the first time.
rubik's dude
Member
Not total control, in Lynch's own words, Frost is at least 50% of Twin Peaks.
Speaking of, if anyone finds themselves wanting more after season 3, check out Frost's books The Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier. They're canon companion pieces and are worth their weight in gold in terms of being lore treasure troves.
Aleister Crowley's Moonchild and Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune are also two other books worth checking out. Frost got a lot of the mythology of Twin Peaks from these two books.
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ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
I'm a bit divided on this topic, to be honest. Yes, Frost clearly writes a ton of world mythology for the universe of the show. And shaped the town and character arcs in the original series.
But the relationship between that source material and the actual series -- particularly the final season -- is much more complicated. It's worth noting that the biggest turning point in the franchise was Fire Walk With Me, where Mark Frost had almost no involvement in the final project. That movie went off the rails (in a necessary way, IMO) from the concepts of the original series and brought it much more in line with Lynch's personal projects, particularly things like the nature of electricity or the unique sense of living in a dream reality. And The Return series, as many have noted, is more accurately described as a sequel to Fire Walk With Me than it is a resemblance to the original show. It feels more like "this is the Twin Peaks show you get if you set out from FWWM, instead of starting from the way we originally did things."
In fact, I would say that Frost's mythologies (which are "straightforward" myth readings... in his world, there are the various entities and forces in the American history and they are all real) are simply a kind of sourcebook from which the last season of the show emerges through Lynch's very different reading, where he takes a clearly more surreal view of the nature of the Twin Peaks reality, echoing so many of Lynch's personal projects across every episode, reusing ideas from his past films with variations. I own Frost's 2 final books; and they are simply not reconcilable as straight canon with the show (of course, one part of the complication is that the books present themselves as notes by Tammy Preston, so they are one very-recent-hire agent's unreliable reading of the mythology as she tries to make sense of it from the documents she obtained).
Audrey's reality in the Return is a good example of the complication, which harkens back to Lynch obsession with Sunset Boulevard and feels like a direct callback to that moment of the aging actress's reality being shattered, and also echos Mulholland Drive. According to Frost's book, she's in a mental institution of some kind. Okay; but that doesn't actually give us the story that Lynch uses her for, that's more of just a kind of background to spur the story. In Lynch's take, the question of her reality is complicated by a lot of things, like the way she's searching for Billy in her dream world just as other people are frantically doing that we see outside her scenes, or the way her Roadhouse reprisal of her dance (the fourth-wall moment where she is sort of recognized as the old actress) was very similarly foreshadowed by the reprisal of James's song, another callback to an iconic TV moment that doesn't really make sense within the world, just prior to it happening to Audrey.
Similarly, I saw somewhere where Frost was impressed and even a little astonished by Part 8, because while he and Lynch discussed this background mythology of the atomic bomb etc, it became something totally new in how it was elevated and reshaped for Part 8. These things always seem to follow that pattern in the Return, where Frost builds background mythos and Lynch twists it into his own surreal version of the universe. I simply don't regard Frost's books as "canon" as a consequence; they simplify and frankly dumb down a bit what is happening on screen.
rubik's dude
Member
That's not a Lynch thing though, electricity is a huge component of the occult, which is a Frost thing. Frost brought in the occult elements with inspiration from Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. In addition to electricity, that's also where he got the white/black lodges and psychic possession from.
As is your right to do so, but I've never really understood why people disregard Frost's contributions to Twin Peaks when by Lynch's own admission, he's at least 50% of the DNA.
Trilobit
Absolutely Cozy
The Return is some of the best TV that has been made. Just make sure that you are in the right mood for it and don't just bingewatch it in a day.
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
Well the electricity goes way back for Lynch too -- even the closing of his early film Eraserhead, with the electrical outlet spewing sparks and the electrical hums taking over...
or the ending to Lynch's solo project The Hotel Room, where the lights coming back on (from power outage) mark the sudden ending, and are unnaturally bright for a fade out that reminds me a bit of the ending of The Return.
Or Lost Highway, where the electric chair sequence marks the entering into the other world... etc.
rubik's dude
Member
Adding onto this, if you can get the reprinted Z to A collection, do so. It has S3E8 in 4k (along with the pilot) and gaht dayum is it a spectacle.
rubik's dude
Member
That's fair. I'm sure one of the reasons why Lynch and Frost worked well together was that they had a shared interest in the occult. Here's a link to an interview where Frost mentions some of where he got the lore from.
The Crowley stuff is more explicit in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, as he directly mentions the book Moonchild in relation to the birth of Judy and Babalon Working (an occult experiment by the rocket scientist responsible for the Trinity test, Jack Parsons).
Redeeming Casualty
Neo Member
Man I just can't believe he is gone. His movies really helped out and I saw that movies could be different and don't have to follow trends or copycat anything. Be yourself and it will resonate with an audience. Favorite movie of his I love is Muholland Drive and The Elephant Man. Side note something that I realized was that the Nintendo Switch 2 was announced the same day he died. I might be reaching but I want to believe that was strange phenomenon and that realization has me have hope for the future. I don't know I just know David would have told me to give experience life and enjoy art.
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
this is a fun watch -- you'll see Ebert's long history of not being a fan of Lynch (though he repeatedly calls him extremely talented, he feels his talents are misdirected) until Mulholland Drive, where it suddenly clicks for him, he raves in the review and went on to repeatedly refer to it as one of the great films of its time
rubik's dude
Member
I showed Mulholland Drive to a friend as an introduction to Lynch, and they hated it for the first 3/4ths. Once that twist happened though, I could see their neurons firing, they became engrossed until the very end, piecing together everything that happened before under an entirely new context. They ended up wanting to watch it again immediately lol.
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
At the 2001 Academy Awards, I can't believe that Lynch was up for best director for Mulholland Drive... and they awarded it to hack Ron Howard of all people for A Beautiful Mind, an awful pseudo-intellectual film. What a joke.
rubik's dude
Member
Hey but at least Angelo Badalamenti beat Phil Collins at the 1991 Grammys for the Twin Peaks theme song.
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
And it gets even worse for that year... they gave A Beautiful Mind not only best picture (lol) and best director (looool) but also best screenplay for Akiva Goldsman of all people.
I'll be bold and say he's one of the worst 2 or 3 writers in the entire history of film hands down, and I can't believe they let him ride on to ruin so many more films with that "academy award winning" title to his name.
He's the guy who has 3 well-deserved Raspberry awards nominations for worst screenplay... for A Time to Kill, Batman & Robin, and Transformers: The Last Knight. And he wrote the absolute trash that is Star Trek: Picard.
Truly the most awful Academy Awards year of all time there, you couldn't pick bigger hacks than Howard & Goldsman.